Weaving a Semantic Web across OSS repositories: a spotlight on bts­link, UDD, SWIM

Several public repositories and archives of facts about libre software projects, developed either by open source communities or by research communities, have been flourishing over the Web in the recent years. These enable new analysis and support new quality assurance tasks.

By using Semantic Web techniques, the databases containing data about open-source software projects development can be interconnected, hence letting OSS partakers identify resources, annotate them and further interlink them using dedicated properties, collectively designing a distributed semantic graph. Such links expressed with standard Semantic techniques are paving the way to new applications (including ones meant for “end-users”). For instance this may have an impact on the way research efforts are conducted (less fragmented), and could also be used by development communities to improve Quality Assurance tasks.

A goal of the research conducted within the HELIOS project, is to address bugtracker synchronization issues. For that, the potential of using Semantic Web technologies in navigating between many different bugtracker systems scattered all over the open source ecosystem is being investigated.

This position paper presents some existing tools, projects and models proposed by OSS actors that are complementary to research initiatives, and that are likely to lead to useful future developments: UDD (Ultimate Debian Database) and bts-link, developed by the Debian community, and SWIM (Semantic Web enabled Issue Manager) developed by Mandriva.

The HELIOS team welcomes comments on the future paths that can be considered in using the Semantic Web approach for improving these projects.